Canadian Jewish Community Rebuilding Torah Ark

Like so much of European Jewry, the Jewish communities of Poland were decimated during the Holocaust. All but a few dozen Jews from Jaslo, Poland - a town that was 97% destroyed by the Nazis - were murdered, after their synagogue was burned on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism. NowIsrael Hayom's Danny Brenner reports that a few surviving members of the town's Jewish community in Toronto are having the ark rebuilt by a kibbutzin Israel:

A team from northern Israel has reconstructed an ornate Torah ark destroyed by the Nazis in Poland.

The ark belonged to a synagogue located in what was once the heart of the small Jewish community of Jaslo in southeast Poland. Nazi forces occupied the town in 1939 and set fire to the magnificent synagogue on Yom Kippur of that year. The Nazis would go on to kill the Jews of Jaslo. In 1945, the town was liberated by the Russian Army. The few dozen members of the community that managed to survive were scattered all over the world following the war. Several of them reached the Canadian city of Toronto, where they decided to reconstruct the synagogue of their childhood.

Lavi Furniture Industries, located on the religious Kibbutz Lavi in the Lower Galilee, was commissioned for the job. Company CEO Micha Oberman told Israel Hayom that "the Torah ark in the Jaslo synagogue was dedicated in 1905. With a height of 11.5 meters (38 feet) and a width of six meters (20 feet), it was one of the largest and most magnificent Torah arks ever built in any synagogue, anywhere in the world. It can hold up to 15 Torah scrolls..."

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